[jbovlaste]

I ran Slackware for ~6 years, my first serious distro. It's kind of the perfect learning distro for Linux - a super stable base, but if you want more you need to learn how to do it yourself. You didn't need to compile your own kernel or set up tons of configuration just to boot, but if you wanted certain graphics drivers or other software, you quickly learned how to write shell scripts and manage builds and dependencies. I remember spending quite a few hours learning how to build my own media stack with mpv and all dependencies (Slackware only shipped with MPlayer in those days, and with no system ffmpeg). I found it to be a much better experience for that than other distros like Arch or Void, those are just too much at the beginning. Because of Slackware, for a good while my most comfortable programming language was bash!

I stopped using it when I had less time for tweaking my computer in my life (I moved to Debian), but it was a very formative experience. Good defaults, but with all the power to change whatever you want and the simplicity to make it manageable.

Happy birthday Slackware!

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.)

What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience with a laptop where audio was not working. After a small amount of reading, I edited a file, recompiled the kernel and voila I had audio. The fact I was able to do that as a total novice was what made me a loyal user for the ensuing decades.

[jmclnx]

> That's what Slackware was supposed to be

After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware.

BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist.

And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I may end up putting in a PR for 10.0 BETA once I am sure of the issue.

[NikkiA]

More likely 386BSD than NetBSD back then, although the timeline between the two is only a year and a bit apart.

Back in '92 I was interested in 386BSD, but told to check out linux (which was at 0.12 at the time), back then it was the root/boot disk distro, then mcc, then slackware.

[exikyut]

What's the minor hardware issue?

[jmclnx]

I have a Laptop with 2 video Chips, Intel and Nvidia.

The Nvidia chip gets very hot, even when I disable it on boot. The CPU Temp stays low.

The Nvidia chip is in the lower left corner of the Laptop, and it cannot be disabled by a BIOS Switch. Since NetBSD has Nouveau support, I want to be sure 10.0 BETA supports that specific chip before deciding what to do.

FWIW, same thing heat issue happens with OpenBSD, but OpenBSD has no Nvidia support, luckily OpenBSD is able to ignore it. Slackware, no issue with Nouveau and heat.

[exikyut]

I see, interesting. Definitely sounds like a kernel thing, and I honestly wonder if it isn't a BIOS/firmware issue with the Nvidia GPU handling incomplete initialization sanely. I wonder what would happen if you just tried booting DOS or some other OS on the thing. Or just sat in the BIOS?

If booting into something barebones leaves everything cool, and depending on how long it takes for the chip to get warm, perhaps you could move a `for (;;);` further and further down into the OpenBSD kernel and find the point things get cranky that way.

Extremely hacky approach though, I'll definitely concede that point >.>

(But if you want to try it, I would wholeheartedly recommend looking into something like iPXE, which would let you download each test kernel over HTTP at boot time and make the iteration process tolerable. This assumes you have a second machine though...)

[jlarocco]

I was just telling a co-worker literally yesterday that a few years of Slackware was the single most effective thing I did to learn Linux well.

I ran it on my desktop and an old (old in the early 2000s!) laptop with 32 MB of RAM, and learned a TON. It's the perfect generic "Linux" system, and you can take it in any direction you want, but you have to do it yourself.

Funny enough, I also got too busy and moved to Debian.

[cykros]

I used Slackware, among quite a few others in the early 00's. Moved to Ubuntu and Debian for awhile, but then got too busy to deal with all the questionable design decisions, and have been back on Slackware for the last 5-7 years or so.

It just keeps working, and when a new release comes out, it keeps working better. Better than I can say for my experience on most other distros. That it moved to pulseaudio eventually in the first place was a bit of a gasp moment, but it's generally been very good at adhering to the Unix design philosophy -- a rare thing these days.

[akoster]

I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely something to do with a combination of LILO, an NVMe interface SSD and EFI/CSM but I hope to get to the bottom of it. Worst case scenario, I perhaps can update the kernel via the bootable ISO as that was stable as a rock during the install.

[lelanthran]

> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers.

It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep.

In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a factory job to pay for things.

So my 486 had no CDROM. And it only had 4MB of RAM. And a pirated version of DOS, until I got slackware.

After 3 months of saving from weekend work I made enough to get a shitty soundblaster pro clone. And then I returned it for another unit, because, as I complained to the store owner "this doesn't work". When the replacement didn't work either I realised it must be my computer, more specifically, those "drivers" provided on the floppy disk were for msdos :-/

So then I started reading a bit, and digging into the driver sources, and reading the little pamphlet that came with the soundcard. "Hah!" I thought, "the IRQ channel for the soundcard appears to be hardwired!"

And thus begun the longest 3-day weekend of my short life up to that point; Linux had no modules, everything was compiled into a single binary image. You have any idea how long it takes a lowly 486 with 4MB of RAM to compile a kernel?

The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".

Eventually had the soundcard working though. On a system on which no bloody games would run ...

[hnbear]

My first Linux experience was very similar, except graphics card driven.

My neighbor told me to try Linux, and my computer at the time was a Mac (old PPC 603e cpu), which I’d put a PC Voodoo3 in and flashed it with a Max bios. Couldn’t afford a Mac card, PC ones second hand were much cheaper.

Anyway, the basic X frame buffer was so slow I needed accelerated 2D. The Voodoo3 driver was available as a patch to 2.2.18 and I was on 2.2.16. So, had to learn to patch and compile a kernel as one of my first acts of learning Linux.

But it got me accelerated 2D which made X bearable, so I could use KDE (2) or Gnome (1.4, still my fav).

After that it was enough to get me to build my next desktop as a Linux PC through college.

[ang_cire]

> The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".

This is me still when I try to build Gentoo

[richardjam73]

I also used Slackware in the same period and remember having to edit the code of the Kernel to get the CD-ROM to use the correct IRQ/IO to get it to work. This was CD-ROM that used the sound card (Creative Labs) not IDE.

[trevithick]

Good points about Slackware being perfect for learning. It really was, for the reasons you gave. I started with Slackware 9.0, which I think was the last release to fit on a single CD-ROM. Like you I learned a lot about Linux, I wrote lots of simple shell scripts and did a lot of ./configure; make; make install.

Slackware lets you do things your way.

Congrats Patrick and Slackware.